20 years on Wall Street
21 June 2017
Flashback to 1997.
Bill Clinton was president of the United States. The first Harry Potter book was published in the UK and “I’ll be missing you” by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans was number one on the US Billboard charts.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached above 7,000 for the first time (it’s above 21,000 today) and Microsoft was the world’s most valuable company.
And on a sunny day in June 1997, ING shares made their debut on the New York Stock Exchange.
It was a festive occasion, with women in traditional Dutch clothes handing out tulips, and the ING lion strutting on across the trading floor.
“I think we add to the bulls and bears on Wall Street today: the lion,” said Richard Grasso, CEO of the NYSE, back then.
Europe-based companies choose to also list in the US for a variety of reasons. They do it to become more attractive to global investors, to increase liquidity (adding shares to the market for investors to buy and sell), to access a wider range of institutional investors, and help make it easier for US employees to own shares, for example.
The reasons above apply to ING, with the extra motivation of wanting to show a commitment to the market. We aren’t just a publicly listed company in the US, we also have a commercial presence with various Wholesale Banking activities. And today, about 30 percent of ING’s institutional investors are US-based, the largest group in one country.
